"In order to have the future we want, we have to build and invent more of the things we need."
That’s the central claim of Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s new book, Abundance. They argue that Democrat-run cities and states have suffered self-inflicted wounds that are causing a mass exodus to red states, where life is simply more affordable. To stop the bleeding, Dems need to take action on a bold new vision that cuts through red tape to improve people’s lives and address the crises in housing, climate, healthcare and politics.
But many on the left are suspicious. Is this just Reaganomics wrapped up in the intellectualized language of the NY Times? Is Abundance the privileged prosperity gospel for white liberals?
Show Notes
The Abundance Agenda: Neoliberalism’s Rebrand
Abundance: The Left Hates It
Summary of Abundance Critiques
Politico: False Choice Between Abundance and Antitrust
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In spirituality 253, the politics of abundance.
In order to have the future we want, we have to build and invent more of the things we need.
That's the central claim of Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson's new book, Abundance.
They argue that Democrat-run cities and states have suffered self-inflicted wounds that are causing a mass exodus to red states, where life is simply more affordable.
To stop the bleeding, Dems need to take action on a bold new vision that cuts through red tape to improve people's lives and address the crises in housing, climate, healthcare, and politics.
But many on the left are suspicious.
Is this just Reaganomics wrapped up in the intellectualized language of the New York Times?
is abundance, the privileged prosperity gospel for white liberals.
Music
So, abundance is a big idea book.
What is it about?
Here's a quote from their introduction.
Our sympathies align on this with the left, but that is not a debate we can settle.
What is often missing from both sides is a clearly articulated vision of the future and how it should differ from the present.
This book is a sketch of and an argument for one such vision.
So what we have here is a critique by liberals of liberal governance as being too bogged down by the bureaucratic red tape of cumbersome regulation and lacking a visionary focus on building, growth, and innovation.
In the introduction, Klein and Thompson explain that while they have many disagreements with the right, given their backgrounds and their public profiles, they do not see themselves as messengers to the right.
And so they've chosen instead to focus on what liberals can do better.
If we focus only on the sins of MAGA, they argue, we risk ignoring the observation from political scientists Moe and Howell.
Populists don't just feed on socioeconomic discontent, they feed on ineffective government, and their great appeal is that they claim to replace it with a government that is effective, which is one of their own autocratic power.
2024 election data bears this out, showing that it was blue states and blue cities where the failures of liberal governance have been most keenly felt that had the biggest shift to the world.
So this is a big idea book and it's a big topic, I think, for me personally.
And I'm going to express some anecdotes throughout to sort of give my own framework of why I think this is an important book, but also just on social media.
I think the most important aspect of the framework is this...
Constant battle that we've seen, I mean, probably forever, but definitely with the advent of social media, of reality versus ideology.
And I can't imagine just the amount of time we spend talking as a podcast about those differences, which are really important.
But one quote jumped out early to me in the book, which is, to make it work, you must be clear-eyed about when it fails and why it fails.
So first, personally, My political alignment is more with the social democrats.
Now, this is a specific form of socialism, but it is not full socialism.
It takes a gradualist approach.
Now, there are arguments within this own subsection of a sub-party that do we go full socialism or do we only look to basically make...
Certain sectors government run.
And that is my personal feeling, that certain sectors like healthcare and transportation should be under the purview of the government, but that businesses should not also have to, for example, apply to be able to be a business,
which is what would happen in a full socialist country.
I think the free market is very important for startups and business and prosperity.
But I think there's a lot that could go under the purview of the government and be run much better.
Yeah, yeah.
And you and I are probably very, very closely aligned on this.
I mean, the short version for me is I favor Scandinavian style free market economies with robust social safety nets and very well regulated capitalism within the context of a
democracy.
Yes, the regulations is key here, and we have been watching this country have fewer and fewer regulations when we need more.
And part of the problem actually is the fact that What they're talking about is the extremely boring world of bureaucracies.
I was listening to Michael Lewis, who was on Jon Stewart recently, and Michael Lewis, great author.
I really like him.
I know you're going to talk about Malcolm Gladwell in a moment, and Michael Lewis is that sort of writer, but whenever I read one of his books, and I do want to read his new book, which is about bureaucracies, and he hired people like Geraldine Brooks to be part of that, which is fantastic.
He assembled a really solid team to do this.
But we have this idea of bureaucracies.
For example, in our brief last weekend, we talked about Barry Weiss and she brings up the DMV.
My experiences with the DMV in New Jersey and New York and Los Angeles were fucking horrible.
I get to Portland and it's actually pretty well run comparably.
But people hate bureaucracies, but that doesn't mean the people that work within them aren't.
What Klein and Thompson are doing here is they're talking about something that most people don't ever pay attention to, but then when it doesn't work, they're up in arms about.
Just one example to start off.
They write about the fact that in 1982, the then governor of California, Jerry Brown, signed a high-speed rail bill in California to basically connect the entire state, at least Los Angeles to San Francisco, but then to connect more of it as well.
In that time, since 1982, 43 years ago, California has not laid down any tracks for high-speed rail.
And during the same time, China has built 23,000 miles of high-speed rail.
So basically, there's this quote that they offer that I think is worth highlighting.
Over the course of the 20th century, America developed a right that fought the government and a left.
that hobbled it.
Yeah, absolutely.
They make a really, really good argument for that exact sort of contradiction or, you know, dynamic, counterproductive dynamic that's been happening between the left and the right.
And really at the center of the argument that they're making from the start of the book is this utopian vision, right?
Where basically they're saying, if we can...
Change some of these things.
If we can get out of our own way, here's what might be possible.
And we'll talk in a little bit about how much criticism this aspect of the book has drawn.
But it starts with this kind of science fiction fantasy vision of the world 25 years from now.
And in this imagined utopia, there's plentiful clean energy, there's sustainable agriculture, lab-grown animal protein that's cruelty-free, universal healthcare, work weeks are made shorter by AI, and the profits from...
Really short.
Yeah. Like, no work.
And the profits from that are shared fairly amongst the population because AI has benefited from the work that human beings have done throughout history.
The climate crisis has been resolved.
Housing is plentiful.
High-speed, environmentally sound transportation is just the norm.
And in this future world, we would look back on what we are doing today.
Yeah, you know, with the high-speed rail thing, I'm going to be going up to a Mariners game because Portland does not yet have a baseball team, although that's in the works right now, possibly.
And, you know, my buddy and I are going to take the bus up in a couple weeks.
And, you know, great, we're taking public transportation because the The current train is really expensive.
It's like $200 round trip, whereas the bus will be like $30 or whatever.
But I would pay a bit more if there was a high-speed rail that existed there.
And they've been talking about it for a long time, just like in California.
And they want to try to start building one by 2032.
And it's like, are you fucking kidding me?
It's a three-hour drive.
You can make this happen, but we don't have the political will.
So let's start.
By talking about some of the criticisms, because I do think they're important, and then we'll go into a couple of the sections.
We need to discuss the title, because the concept of abundance has been in our communities, the New Age wellness communities, for generations.
And distilled, it's basically this.
The universe is inherently limitless and individuals...
Can align themselves with boundless potential through their mindset, through gratitude, whatever spiritual practices they have.
I lived through this rhetoric for decades in yoga studios, and this is when politics was a dirty word.
And the idea that spirituality would ever touch politics was impossible because it was about elevation.
And of course, but there was a crossover because if you were able to align yourself to abundance, well, then any I will admit that the title alone rubs me the wrong way,
but I also understand what Klein and Thompson are going for, which is there are enough resources to go around, but the policies that have been implemented that allow the wealthy and the ultra-wealthy...
All the way up to the ungodly wealthy to prosper has really decimated anyone else's ability to even get by.
So their decision to call it an abundance mindset is a political one.
They believe it's a platform Democrats should run on.
I think it's better served by focusing on the policy benefits of what's going on.
The Democrats are notoriously bad at showing off what they've done.
This is different than the abundance mindset of the new age.
And the reality is you need marketing.
I've always worked for tech companies doing marketing on the side, and I still do.
And I understand that impulse of needing to make things stand out.
But the important point I want to make here is you don't manifest policy.
You have to fight like hell for it.
And this is sort of their contribution to trying to do that.
Exactly. Yeah.
I mean, it's interesting because I don't think the word abundance is as much in the mainstream as it was in the New Age and yoga and wellness space that we've been in for 30 years.
And in that space, it definitely...
Did have the connotation.
It was more of like a Christian science kind of connotation that you only perceive.
There as being not enough money or not enough love or not enough opportunities for work because of your mindset, because thought creates reality.
And really, in the mind of God, everything is infinite.
And so if you just allow yourself to go there, you'll have everything.
And in fact, the people who are at the top of the socioeconomic hierarchy, it's because they have the right kinds of thoughts, because they manifest.
And so, yeah, absolutely.
That is a toxic worldview that denies all kinds of realities that are present in the world and tends to be about victim blaming.
And I think there's a version of that, which is a kind of, instead of spiritual bypass, and maybe it's political bypass, where some people really do want to go into denial about various aspects of politics and economics.
And I could see how, for some people, they would see the cover of the book.
The title of the book and read that opening kind of intro fantasy and go like, oh, these guys just have their heads in the clouds and they're just telling us that if we stay positive and we go after these kind of simple fixes.
Everything will just be fine, because all of these problems are just of our own kind of bureaucratic creation.
So, yeah, we'll talk more about that.
One of the big criticisms of the book is that it is like a Malcolm Gladwell-style book, and I enjoy Malcolm Gladwell books, I'm not going to lie.
Me too.
But I get what they're saying, right?
They're taking a bunch of complex issues, conflating them all together into some oversimplified solution, that if you just change just one thing, all of these other things will be fine.
And, you know, in response to that, Klein and Thompson say, look, this is not an exhaustive policy list that we're providing here.
This is not just Project 2029 for the Democrats.
It's really a call to revive values and to create a better narrative that the Democrats can sell to the people that they are losing in droves.
And one of their central sort of theoretical claims is that we are between two political orders right now.
And so for this, they lean on the work of Gary Gersel, who's a historian who looks at political history and says that even though Democrats and Republicans disagree on all sorts of things, there tend to be these dominant orders that stretch over much longer periods of time than just election cycles,
within which the Republicans and the Democrats are actually fairly aligned.
His examples of this, or the main instances of this, are the New Deal political order and then the neoliberal political order.
What Klein and Thompson are essentially arguing is that the neoliberal order is collapsing, and this has caused fringe movements from the left and the right to gain more traction.
But both of these forms of populism are, they argue, rooted in a kind of scarcity.
Where MAGA gets autocratic, says there's not enough and we have to close the borders and we have to do all of these draconian things and get into tariffs to protect manufacturing jobs.
On the other side, Democrats tend to get more bureaucratic.
We have to institute all of these unwieldy, impractical regulations that just keep accruing over time like bad evolutionary spandrels into this big mess where you can't get anything done.
And so Democrats fail to make it work.
They fail to make government work for the people by understanding that they have to revise and update those regulations.
And importantly, they also have to get behind funding scientific innovation.
So another big criticism here is that, look, this could just all be center-left Reaganomics.
This is just liberalism dressed up in new clothing.
You know, the Reaganomics criticism is really talking about supply-side economics as a deeply failed economic theory.
And I think the reason why this gets pinned on the book is because they are saying we need to increase the supply of housing and of medicine and of clean energy infrastructure.
But we also have to examine regulatory gridlock.
And that's not about abandoning environmental protections and consumer protections.
For big business reasons.
It's not about, as Reaganomics famously did, promoting the lower marginal tax rates and saying that government needs to be slashed in order to be able to give big tax cuts.
But rather, Klein and Thompson are saying government should actively make sure citizens have what they need.
And that the housing crisis, in part, is due to policies that inflate property values.
Yeah, there's a moment where they talk about how homelessness rates rise in democratic cities when the available housing is so low, whereas states like Texas,
They specifically cite Houston, which does not have nearly the level of homelessness, even though they have a similar climate as Los Angeles.
So a lot of times people are like, well, it's California.
Of course, people will go there to live outdoors, but Houston actually has a similar, but they have more housing supply there because there are more lax regulations, which when you see the numbers laid out like that,
That's actually an incredible section of the book because they knock down each of the explanations that people will offer for why California has such high rates of homelessness.
That the climate is nice.
Is it that people are drug addicts?
Is it because there's limited mental health resources?
And it's like, well, yeah, those are all factors, but we can go to other places where those things are happening as well, and you still have much lower rates of homelessness.
And ultimately, their point is it's because of the lack of availability of housing and incredible high prices.
Drug use and homelessness, that's a common argument from the right.
Well, these are all drug addicts, but plenty of research has shown that a lot of people don't start using drugs until they become homeless because...
They're in these communities where that is what is available and life is not going so well at that time.
So a lot of people become dependent or addicted only at that point.
So I will say here that despite Klein and Thompson being emphatic in interviews about their liberal politics and their opposition to Trump, as well as to other more mainstream Republican politicians, there is one devastating critique here that I think it's important to flag and to keep an eye on.
And that is that this concept of abundance, it turns out, is quite central to a coalition that held the Abundance Conference in October of last year.
And that particular coalition draws on funding from a complex network of both neoliberal and conservative think tanks, some of which have ties to Koch and to others which have questionable agendas, like being ultra-conservative religious people,
being opposed to LGBTQ rights, etc.
And Derek Thompson was actually a speaker at the Abundance Conference back in October.
Ezra Klein was not.
I'll be keeping an eye on that in terms of how embedded are they in this group with some similar ideas, and how much are they really charting a way forward for progressives?
And we should note that the very concept does come from an article that Thompson wrote, although Ezra Klein has more of a mainstream figure.
More people know who he is because of his affiliation with Vox and the New York Times.
Derek Thompson, I've read his first book.
I've been following him for years, but at The Atlantic, he's just not as well known.
So the concept is rooted in his work.
We touched upon housing, and let's talk a little bit more about that, because that is what jumped out at me when I first started hearing about this book.
So first off...
I began my career in local journalism in New Jersey, working for a paper called the Monroe Sentinel and then the Princeton Packet series of newspapers out there.
And part of my job was to go to zoning board meetings.
Maybe five people would show up at most of them.
It's when the city council members meet and they talk about, okay, Are we going to allow this area, which is zoned for industry, to allow some housing to happen?
Are we going to allow this street to be widened in order to have better drainage?
All the really fucking boring stuff of bureaucracy, like I said.
Now the thing about reporting on that is that no one shows up.
No one cares.
They don't even know it's happening, even though every city has these meetings all of the time.
Until something changes and then people's like, well, how did this happen?
And you're like, well, you didn't go to the zoning board meeting.
And this is where the nuts and bolts of bureaucracy and of government work and function at a local and state level, but people generally aren't involved.
And that's why it's so challenging to talk about these sorts of topics in an environment.
I'm talking about a social media environment where shocking news proliferates all of the time.
But again, things are happening all of the time and it only rises to the level of public consciousness once it impacts that person specifically most of the time.
So they talk about the NIMBY and YIMBY movements.
I want to also frame this in the fact that when they write about the exodus from California, I'm one of those people.
I was in my mid-40s.
I had, over the course of a decade, saved up enough money with my wife to finally be able to afford a down payment on a house.
And we wanted to own a house at some point.
And when we looked around, we lived in Culver City and Palm specifically at the time.
And we realized that for our budget, we could get a two-bedroom apartment in the Valley, which is not Los Angeles.
It's not far, but it's not Los Angeles.
For the price we can get in an old building with no parking and sometimes no laundry in your unit.
And we're looking at it being like, we haven't saved up for so long.
To move to the Valley to get an apartment that we own in a giant building.
That's not what we're doing here.
And so we moved to Portland and for the same price, we were able to get a three-story townhouse with a little yard in a developing section of the neighborhood, not like prime Portland.
But it's something we invested in because we both worked from home and we wanted some space.
So it really hit me reading about that because...
It is ridiculous how expensive, and I know you still live there, but Los Angeles is expensive.
I also left New York for similar reasons.
I was tired of my rent going up astronomically year over year, and I couldn't deal with that sort of environment anymore.
And so basically what Thompson and Klein are doing here, they write that cities are where wealth is created, not just where it is displayed.
And I watched that.
I watched that living in New Jersey City in the 90s and the early aughts when in 2015 it became the most expensive city to live in in the country for a while.
But when I lived there, it was just people – it was really just working class population there who wanted to work in New York City but couldn't afford to live there.
And I kind of – my experience was replicated over and over again.
I moved into Gowanus on the border of Park Slope in Brooklyn.
And then I moved into Palms, bordering Culver City.
I kept moving into these neighborhoods that I could just barely afford, but that eventually became gentrified and I got priced out of them.
And that is a really frustrating situation as a human being to be in, to want to live in cities where a lot's going on, but not being able to afford it.
And they touch upon that through a variety of means and they mostly come down through...
Yeah, they use a really simple heuristic that I think is very telling, which is ask yourself, in any given neighborhood, could the firefighters who protect that neighborhood from burning down afford to own a house in the neighborhood?
And if the answer is no, well, then you're seeing a real imbalance there.
And they talk about how over the course of multiple decades, How many times you'd have to multiply your salary to be able to buy the house in the neighborhood goes up and up and up and up.
What percentage of your overall net worth is accounted for by the house goes up and up and up so that eventually the house, rather than just being a place you live, becomes your primary asset.
And then people who are able to invest in a house as a big primary asset like that, when it increases in value, that's fantastic for those people.
And so they want to maintain whatever dynamics are going to allow the house to keep increasing in value in ways that just eventually mean everyone else is completely priced out of the market.
The policies don't allow for the building of houses at the rate of which people are moving in or that live there already.
So there's not enough available housing.
And so when it is your primary asset, I'm one of those people.
What happens is scarcity becomes important to raise the value of that home.
But it's a double-edged sword because if in a few years I was able to make a profit on this and turn it over, Well, then I can't move into the same neighborhood anymore in order to actually benefit from that increased value.
I then have to go to somewhere else that doesn't have the same benefits as where I currently live.
And that is the constant problem that they're citing.
And they also note that as vacancy rates plummet...
Meaning there's less available housing, homelessness rises.
And Portland, even though it was somewhere I could then afford, it still has been going through a lot of similar issues as Los Angeles, just at a smaller scale.
Yeah, yeah.
And I'll just add, as my own anecdote, my wife and I, we make the kind of money in this town where we should be able to buy a house, where maybe 20 or 30 years ago we would have been able to buy a house.
It is absolutely...
The only way we would be able to buy a house working full-time as hard as we do on the west side of LA is if someone in our family dies and we inherit a huge chunk of money.
Otherwise, it's just impossible.
So downstream from this housing and infrastructure crisis, the authors argue or point out that there is this exodus.
From democratic cities and states, families are fleeing to places like Texas and Arizona.
They have this quote, gate to the great cities of California and families flee to Texas and Arizona.
When you allow housing to become scarce, where the wages are highest, you shut down a powerful engine that long kept social mobility in America high.
Their diagnosis is that it is these unwieldy regulations.
As well as individualistic litigation policy, which overprivileges homeowners to then shut down projects that would result in the building of new housing, as well as all kinds of infrastructure, including transportation and clean energy.
And actually, the irony here is that the data shows that the more progressive a California city is, the less construction gets permitted there.
Scarce housing results in more homelessness.
And therefore, this great exodus that's happening from blue cities and states into red ones means that we're approaching a real crisis here because it's going to affect the census in 2030, and that's going to affect the Electoral College.
And that's going to make it harder for Democrats to win elections because Democrat states are going to be worthless in terms of...
Democrats need to step up here.
As Trump fails to deliver on the affordability crisis, Democrats need to have a new vision.
And it requires recognizing what Republicans are doing better in states like Texas, where they have a housing boom.
It also requires running against what Republicans are doing badly, and that's not difficult.
What does that mean?
For example, that just means that don't make it so hard to get permits.
I had a friend in Santa Monica who wanted to change his garage into an ADU.
It took him six years of permitting and thousands of dollars in fees in order to be able to do that.
Creating ADUs actually lets you have renters come in and increases available housing.
I've heard about those over and over again.
I no longer am a fan of Bill Maher.
I haven't watched him in years.
But I do remember when I did him talking about trying to get solar in his house.
And it took years to be able to add solar.
And so you get to Texas and they also have regulations there that some companies are fighting.
But it is not as hard to...
And so what Klein and Thompson point out over and over again is how there's redundancy in environmental standards.
And it's because left-leaning groups also want to get their hands in things.
And so you'll have things, you'll have examples where environmental regulations are in place, but then you have three different groups that need to come in in order to verify that it's up to...
And so you need to take out Yeah, exactly.
It's not that they're saying, let's get rid of regulations altogether.
They're saying regulations have become completely unwieldy and redundant, and there are multiple stages you have to go through, and everything gets held up interminably, like all of these anecdotes you're presenting and like the many instances they present.
One thing we should say here before we move away from housing is that, of course, notebook...
Can be about everything, right?
And so there is a big criticism from antitrust advocates, which says that, look, this book fails to address the real problem, which is that there are these mega corporate investors creating monopolies.
They're driving up housing prices by buying thousands of homes themselves to then resell.
And even if we apply all of these nice policy proposals in abundance, this is still going to be a really, really big issue that's not going to magically disappear.
I'll provide a link in the show notes for anyone interested in this particular angle.
There's a really good opinion piece in Politico that Grapples with the topic and I think does a really good job.
And that is true.
But I also point out the fact that when I lived in LA in 2017, and you probably remember this, we passed a quarter cent tax on the sales tax to raise $100 million to build all this housing for homeless people.
And by the time I moved out in 2021, 2022, they had well exceeded the $100 million fund that they needed.
and they had built a handful of units in one building in that time.
And it was all because of that bureaucracy.
So what we're talking about doesn't just affect, quote unquote, middle class housing or second, third level housing.
It also involves projects that should be helping people.
So we mentioned the big corporations a moment ago.
Let's touch upon the climate change because I think this is really important.
And
So they're talking about the theory of degrowth as a possible solution that some on the left propose, which isn't specifically about climate change, but it does provide a framework for understanding the challenges of climate change.
So basically, the theory is this.
Infinite expansion of the economy is contradictory to finite material resources.
Degrowth activists believe economic growth should be measured by Being measured by GDP should be abandoned.
Instead, we should focus on metrics like health, education, housing, and ecological sustainability, which will favor humans even if financial metrics slow down.
All the focus on the stock market right now doesn't reflect all of reality, which I think is important.
And the theory is also very critical of free market capitalism and focuses on public services and care work and relational goods.
And they write favorably about this.
This is, to me, where it also gets into what I was talking about before, which is reality versus ideology.
So there's an element of degrowth of being like, and I've heard this often over the years, if people just stop consuming so much, we could get over the sort of...
I turn to the work of novelist Amitav Ghosh, who I've read all of his books.
They're fantastic.
But he turned one of his lectures into a book called The Great Derangement, Climate Change and the Unthinkable.
And he points out that cities that have been colonized in the past are most at threat for climate change right now.
They're usually port cities like New York City or Amsterdam.
Always jumped out that he brings up in the book is you have American or Western activists, climate change activists, good intention, but they're saying we need to stop consuming and using all of these things that we have.
And then you have the colonized people, formerly poor regions of the earth who are no longer impoverished and are starting to gain some money.
India is a good example of that.
And they look at it and they say, wait a second, you've been enjoying all these resources for generations.
And now that we can afford them, you're telling us we can't have these things?
And they see it as just the perpetuation of colonialism.
And so that...
I do agree that financial metrics shouldn't be all of what's focused on that.
It would be great.
There's the World Happiness Score, for example, index, for example.
That's all great, but the idea that we can just stop consuming our way out of the problems with climate change is perpetuating that sort of mindset.
That has been criticized.
And so this leads to another criticism on this book that we can't technologize ourselves out of this problem.
And the reality is we're kind of going to have to at this point because we're not going to just stop consuming.
Yeah, I mean, those are two sides of the argument, right?
One side says we have to just keep bringing down consumption and we have to impose all of these controls.
Around the world in order to prevent the climate crisis.
And of course, that argument makes a lot of sense.
But then it does seem to be an impractical kind of endless struggle against something that it's like, how are you going to practically make this happen?
And then the flip side of it is, no, we're going to invent our way out of it.
are going to create this idyllic vision through technology.
And then it's very easy to say, well, you guys are just techno-optimists.
You're in the vein of Andreessen and Sachs and Elon Musk.
Everything's going to be solved by brilliant tech billionaires being free to get even richer while they invent neat gadgets that will
help, you know, put band-aids on the problem.
This must just be more neoliberalism, more supplied side Reaganomics, and it's just Project 2029 for Democrats actually moving to the right.
What do you think about this?
I think that compared
Comparing their views on technology to Marc Andreessen lacks an understanding of what Andreessen does and what they're proposing and about technology in general.
Because what Andreessen and his cohort are proposing is deregulating every facet of business so that they can just run with it, break everything they want, and it doesn't matter.
It's rooted in the...
In the concept of trickle-down economics, it is complete bullshit.
We know it doesn't work.
It is autocratic by nature and it is why they're trying to build their own city in Nevada that can be free of governmental rule and oversight and then they can run it how they want.
That is vastly different from the sort of technological advances that have driven society forward for hundreds of years.
And we'll touch upon this in the next section.
in healthcare a little bit more.
*music*
So I said earlier, you know, the housing section hit me hard, but the hardest section hit me was definitely healthcare because so much of my work is based on understanding that universal healthcare is so important to improve health outcomes.
And so much of the work I do in pushing back against Maha's ideas that it's food additives and seed oils is really just a farce for them to continue to be involved in a capitalist economy that is basically unregulated.
And enjoy the fruits of that while creating a smokescreen.
So Kline and Thompson tell this story.
Through the work of Katalin Carrico, who basically single-handedly championed mRNA when the rest of the scientific community thought it was a mostly useless molecule.
And you've probably heard us before on the show critique Robert Malone.
He's one of the big anti-vaxxers who says he invented mRNA technology.
The truth is, hundreds of people worked on that.
And the idea that a white man would take credit for what a woman was doing for a long time shouldn't surprise us either.
Imagine that.
Yeah, Carico, she spent her entire career basically not getting what she wanted until she won the Nobel Prize for her work in it, which is that story over and over again.
So she fought for mRNA-related projects for decades.
They were almost always rejected.
She couldn't get funded.
She was actually demoted from her position at the University of Pennsylvania in 95 because she didn't produce enough quality papers, quote unquote.
And then she didn't receive tenure and they fired her in 2013.
And in 2023, she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine alongside Drew Weissman, who Klein and Thompson also write about because their combined work led through the breakthrough mRNA vaccines.
I don't want to get into the actual science behind this.
I do recommend that chapter and the book in general for people to learn more.
But the point that they're making is how important innovation in science and technology is and how nothing works in a linear fashion.
So, for example, you might have heard some people...
The wellness influencers who are all anti-Ozempek, and they're like, well, you know, this comes from studying the venom of gillow monsters.
Sounds awful.
Sounds terrifying.
And they do this all the time, but that is how science actually works.
So, for example, antidepressants, which are the stepchildren of sedatives and early interventions like the Milltown, and anesthesia, which...
Greatly benefits society because we can now be knocked out when we get surgery, which wasn't a thing for most of history.
That all comes from factory workers observing the effects of textile dyes.
People would be creating dungarees, and they would get lightheaded, and they'd feel good, and they would get loopy.
And then it was like, wait, what's in this to make that?
And that is the lineage that led to our understanding of benzodiazepines and SSRIs and SNRIs.
But it sounds so unnatural, Derek.
It's really unnatural.
These are chemicals.
Right. That's the argument.
And life is chemistry.
I mean, another one you'll hear is cooking oils were once tire lubricants, so you shouldn't eat seed oils.
And it's just a profound ignorance of chemistry overall.
So to the point of abundance, Klein and Thompson note how unwilling the government has been historically to fund research without clear objectives and stated goals.
And so working outside of the box is rarely rewarded.
But that is what often leads to scientific breakthroughs.
Instead, they point out that scientists spend 40% of their time doing paperwork and trying to get research grants instead of being able to focus on their craft.
And look, research money, grant money only goes so far.
People have to try to get it, and I understand that.
It is a competitive landscape.
They're saying...
Fund it more so there's not so much competition.
Let people try to do the research that they want because you never know where those breakthroughs are going to come from.
Yeah, and one of the things they point out that I think is so of the moment we're in is that Trump could have run on the incredible success of Project Warp Speed, but instead because of crazy conspiracism and just...
Where the ideology has gone in the MAGA universe, that has to be completely sidelined.
And so actually one of the greatest scientific breakthroughs in the history of medical science is just swept under the rug right now instead of being rightly held up as an example of what we can do.
When we get our asses in gear and when the government really throws its weight behind the importance of scientific innovation.
Yeah, I love that part because they point out that Operation Warp Speed, forget the stupid name and forget the fact that it was Trump, it was a miracle.
Ten months to produce a vaccine against a novel virus.
That is unheard of.
And they point out that...
The government spent $40 billion from start to finish, from the start of funding to the distribution of tens of millions or hundreds of millions of free vaccines, but it prevented 20 million deaths and saved the economy $6.5 trillion.
But you're right.
Trump wouldn't run on it because his coalition is anti-vax, and Democrats wouldn't run on it because Trump...
And so here you have an innovation that no one talks about except negatively anymore, and that is really damaging.
And I would argue that's part of what helps to bring Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in to run all public health agencies.
We need innovations in health and healthcare.
We need universal healthcare, as I said, because they note that between 1999 and 2023, the average insurance premium went up from $5,791 to $23,968
with worker contributions quadrupling, more than quadrupling during the time.
And here's the thing.
When countries have socialized medicine through a centralized patient advocacy agency, they can negotiate down drug prices and healthcare prices.
I got my meniscus repair a few years ago, and when I did, I read that the disparities in Los Angeles at different hospital systems, you could pay $3,000 for meniscus repair.
You could pay $15,000.
There's no pricing.
You don't know until afterwards.
And that is because we don't have a centralized system that fights for patients.
And so what do you get?
You get a Zempick costing 10 times as much in America as it does in...
So these are all the kinds of...
Blatantly cutthroat capitalist deregulations that, in fact, Klein and Thompson are arguing against and saying, no, the government needs to be much more involved in all of this, in funding the research, in funding the healthcare, in really getting behind giving the people what they need.
So as we start to wrap up here, toward the end of the book, I know both you and I were like, wait, hold on a second.
This is really interesting that they're quoting these guys.
Toward the end of the book, Klein and Thompson quote Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels as a basis for a leftist rationale of abundance.
And so here's the quote.
The bourgeoisie, during its rule of scarce 100 years, has created more passive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together.
They're quoting this from the Communist Manifesto, going on to say, And now this is Klein and Thompson commenting.
They did not want to end this revolution in production.
They wanted to accelerate it.
Just as feudalism blocked production that only capitalism could unleash, so did capitalism constrain the abundance that a new paradigm might likewise unleash.
And they go on back to Marx.
Amongst capitalism's many sins was that it prevented the most wondrous and useful technology from being invented and deployed in the first place.
And back to their commentary here.
That was fascinating.
Yeah, that whole ending definitely floored me.
And one thing I want to close with that they point out that I do think is a problem, and I know we have a real estate, I don't want to say mogul because most of his projects have failed, but also a reality television star as an actor.
But they actually point out how most training to be a politician in America is by becoming a lawyer.
There's an outsized number of lawyers who are politicians now.
And they talk about adversarial legalism, how it runs politics.
And so what you get basically is an entire system set up that's always looking how it can take it to the courts.
And we know how important the Supreme Court is in our current construction.
And T.R. Reid in The Healing of America, which is a book about healthcare systems around the world, writes about this too because he goes, In most every country, doctors don't really have to take out insurance for litigation because people don't sue doctors.
And in America, and they point to Ralph Nader as really kicking this off from a consumer level, lawsuits are just abundant here.
That's a different form of abundance, but it's one that clogs down the system.
Now, let me be clear.
Right now, for example, people suing the Trump administration to block them from doing things like disappearing people is really important.
So I'm not saying law isn't effective, but when your recourse and your training is in legalism, And that's how you're running a nation.
You can only end up with more and more red tape all of the time because you're being blocked at every level and that's going to stop the ability to actually share in that abundance.
And I'll leave with this quote because it was one of those that just punched me.
There is some margin at which trying to do more ultimately means achieving less.
And I think that that is my biggest takeaway from this book.
Yeah, I mean, it's fascinating watching how the arrival of this book is playing out within the political commentariat.
And I think, for me, there's an important lesson here for those of us who are left of center, Left of center policies have been constructed and implemented over time and looking at whether or not they have worked and whether or not they've been counterproductive is not the same as betraying.
Left of center beliefs and ideology and wanting to defeat the Republicans and the Magas.
It's actually a way of saying, hey, let's look at what we've been doing that has not been working and try to fix it so that we can start to win again.
And so we can win back the people that we've been losing because of the low-hanging fruit that we've been serving up.
On a platter to people who want to use it opportunistically against us.
And I think whatever criticisms people might still have, whatever specific points and policy disputes might show up against Klein and Thompson, what they're trying to do is that.
